TEXAS’s Willie Hugh Nelson has not only lived a long life, he’s lived an almost implausibly full one too. By the time he released his first album, And Then I Wrote – in 1962, at the age of 29 – he’d already been playing in dance bands for almost 20 years and had penned a handful of country classics for other singers, including Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Faron Young’s “Hello Walls”.
In the 60 years since, he’s released over 70 more albums and starred in dozens of films. He’s been a country outlaw, a redneck hippie, a concept-album auteur, a standards singer, an IRS target, a Highwayman, and an affable connoisseur of golf and weed. His deft synthesis of so many different styles and sounds has inspired many subsequent generations of country crooners and renegade rock’n’rollers, while his list of duet partners – from Ray
